Why in News?

• NITI Aayog is organizing the fourth edition of NITI Lecture Series with theme this year is “AI for ALL: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Inclusive Growth”.

NITI Lecture Series:

• The ‘NITI Lectures: Transforming India’ are being held annually since 2016 featuring eminent speakers from across the world.
• The aim of the series is to enable learning, both at the Centre & States, from successful development practice world over.
• With the vision of disseminating cutting-edge, innovative ideas in development policy to India, the NITI Lectures are attended by the Government’s top decision makers.
• Through the lectures, NITI Aayog has been bringing policy makers, academics, experts and administrators of global repute to India.

AI ecosystem in India:

• Union Budget-2018 mandated NITI Aayog to come up with a national programme on employing AI towards national development.
• NITI has, since, published a National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence.
• The Strategy is termed #AIForAll as it is focused on leveraging AI for inclusive growth in line with the Government policy of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas.
• NITI Aayog has signed Statements of Intent (SoI) with industry leaders such as Google, Microsoft and IBM to enable use of artificial intelligence in key, high gain sectors of social development – healthcare, agriculture, smart mobility, education and infrastructure.
• Example: India’s diversity of languages is bridged by creating a AI based digital “Ek Bharat, Shrestha Bharat” platform using Natural Language Processing (NLP).
• NLP is a system of protocols which allow machines or computers to understand and interact with human speech and symbols.

Focus on R&D:

• Recognising the importance of research and its commercial adoption in success of AI, NITI has also proposed setting up of Centre of Research Excellence (CORE).
• It aims to focus on developing better understanding of existing core research.
• Besides this, the Aayog also recommends setting up of International Centres of Transformational AI with a mandate to develop and deploy application-based research in collaboration with private players.

Hurdles for AI in India:

• Aiming to put AI to use for all and across sectors, NITI has identified barriers that need to be addressed to achieve success in the use of AI.
• These include lack of expertise, absence of enabling data ecosystem, high resource cost and low awareness, privacy and security issues and absence of collaborative approach to adoption and application of AI.